Lecture 13. Realism and critical realism

Zola (1840-1902)
Considered the founder and leader of French naturalism, Emile Zola was born in Paris of poor parents and raised in Aix-en-Provence. He came to Paris at the age of 18. After working as a clerk in a publishing house, he became a journalist. In 1865 he published his first novel and thenceforth devoted his life to literature. In 1871 he began his 22-year experiment of writing a 20-volume corpus entitled Les Rougon-Macquart. In 1880 he published The Experimental Novel (Le Roman Expé rimental), in which he explained his naturalistic method. For many years, in fact, he used his fiction, along with his theories of fiction, to advance his idea of social reform for a kind of Christian socialism. For Zola, the novelist is like the scientist performing an experiment: he is independent of moral conventions, he writes from careful observation and documentation, and he focuses on the forces of heredity and environment. In The Rougon-Macquarts (1871-1893), he uses his naturalistic method, with scientific precision and scrupulous attention to detail, to give an account of the Rougon-Macquart family. Besides being the “case-history” of a family, this series of fiction provides in fact a general picture of France during the Second Empire. However, this collection of naturalistic novels is not interesting enough for reading.
Zola’ s successful novel is Thé rè se Raquin (1867). It is “an analytical labor on two living bodies like that of a surgeon on corpses.” It tells the story of a young woman, Thé rè se Raquin, who is unhappily married to her first cousin Camille, and so enters into a sordid, passionate affair with her husband’ s friend Laurent, who is an artist. Later, with the help of Laurent, Thé rè se drowns Camille during a boat trip. Thereafter, the two secret lovers are haunted by the image of Camille’ s death. Finally, they find life intolerable to them and commit suicide together.
In Russia
Gogol (1802-1852)
Born in Poltava, Ukraine, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol became mainly a novelist and short-story writer. He once worked as a government clerk in St. Petersburg and once wandered abroad in Europe for 12 years. In 1831 he met Pushkin, who was impressed with some of his somewhat fantastic tales about nature and people in Ukraine. In 1836 he published his funny satirical comedy of mistaken identity, The Inspector General. He completed his great novel, Dead Souls, in Rome and published it together with his most famous short story, The Overcoat, in a four-volume edition of his works. He planned to write a second part of the novel but gave up the plan by burning some of the manuscripts shortly before his death.
Dead Souls (Myortvye Dushi, , 1842) is about a swindler named Chichikov. He buys from landowners the “dead souls,” that is, the serfs that are still considered alive although they have died since the last census was taken. He uses the “dead souls” to acquire profit in the transaction of real estate. What is most
interesting in the novel is the realistic description of how he visits and interacts with the landowners. The Overcoat (Shinel, 1842) is about a miserable old government clerk, Akaky Akakyevich in St. Petersburg. He economizes a long time for a new tailor-made overcoat, which is robbed of him when he returns from an evening party wearing it. He is advised to seek the aid of a general, but he is brushed off by the pompous official. He dies broken-hearted and his ghost is said to haunt the city from then on, seeking to rob the authorities of their coats in chilly nights.